“You’re never going to buy a trip from me,” said Lucy.
“I could,” he said and thought, Here it comes. We have these jokey meetings almost daily and they go nowhere. Because she was Gracie’s friend, I’m paralyzed to so much as ask her to dinner. We leave the lightest moments red-faced and sweating, out of fear one of us will ask, “What do you hear from Gracie?” You move toward something that could mean something and all it does is produce fear.
“You’re not like the others,” Lucy said. “You won’t go on a cruise. You don’t like other people well enough.”
“I deplore their eating habits.”
“You won’t go to the Bible lands.”
Frank reached across and covered Lucy’s hands with his own. “Not even Jesus had to worry about hijacking,” he said.
“What’s that have to do with it?”
“Didn’t he, more or less, put the Bible lands on the map?”
“That’s certainly a very strange way to say it, Frank.”
“My problem in planning a trip is getting time and place in the proper relationship. For example, I would love to go to New York, but certainly not after 1925.”
“That’s a problem, and by the way, my hands are beginning to perspire. Don’t keep coming on to me if you’re just going back to your cubicle.”
Astonished, Frank stood up. “You’re a hundred percent correct.” Her beauty was sudden phosphorus, ignited by her remark. He had a spell of immolating madness, wanting to offer himself in some way.
“How’s it going over there?” She nodded in the direction of his office.
“I had one good transaction.”
“Grain?”
“Cattle. How about you?” His mind was diving around like a hooked fish. If they could only get off this dead center.
“Pretty good. Mostly getting kids back from college. Nothing substantial in the way of trips. One screamer, didn’t get his diabetic dinner on a Seattle flight.”
Now Frank felt a wave of insubstantiality. The whole thing was getting away from them. The normal, pleasant prevarications of daily life were becoming unbearable. It would just zoom in like this and be awful. The terror had to be replaced by blind courage.
“Last night,” he said, “I was sitting in your apple tree.” This was it. This was it!
“You were?”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing in my apple tree?”
“I was watching you … uh, get undressed and, uh, watch the news.” What an exciting new world this was. He was perspiring. But no matter what the consequences were, he was going to accept them.
She withdrew her hands from beneath his. There seemed to be no motion anywhere in the building. His eyes felt dry. She got up and went to the window, but moved away from it. He waited for her to talk.
“You’re quite a guy,” she said in an extraordinarily flat voice. Everything seemed in jeopardy. He couldn’t imagine what he had been doing there. He was walking home from the golf course in the dark. Two drinks. Not enough to explain anything. And suddenly he was there. It was too bad he told her. If he didn’t tell Lucy, he knew there could be another time and then it would become routine; then he would be headed off the end of the world. It was time to put himself in her hands. He could tell when she turned around to look at him that he was not going to get off lightly, but it had been his only chance to stop and now he was going to have to take it like a man.
“I think the best thing would be if you went back to your office,” she said. “I think you need a little vacation, Frank. Let me work on it. I’ll give you a ring when I get this trip put together.”
“When you get this trip together …”
“Yes. I’ll call you when I put this little trip together. I can’t do it in five minutes. But not to worry: this has been a long time coming and you’re leaving town. You need to leave town. You haven’t been anywhere since Gracie left. You’ve got to break the pattern.”
“Fine,” he said dully. “Call me.”
In a couple of hours, she dropped off his plane tickets and itinerary without a word. He read it with amazement. He swallowed several times but the feeling his trip gave him wouldn’t go away.
8
Frank pulled the parka up around his face and looked out at the river. Pack ice from the slow breakup of winter had crowded the river from bank to bank. The Eskimo shacks along the shore seemed to reveal no signs of life except for the old caribou hides nailed to their walls and flapping bleakly in the north wind.
Frank wandered back to the hotel to play video games with the Eskimos. The town had the appearance of a military supply dump: windowless storehouses, pyramids of fuel barrels, vehicles abandoned where they would never run again and where they would endure for centuries of refrigeration.
The hotel, like the other buildings, rested on top of the ground on blocks, out of reach of permafrost. It was a carelessly constructed building, mostly prefabricated, and was not expected to last many more winters. From its windows could be seen the endless granite landscape, streaked with snow and running water, more of a plan for country than country itself. Through this unchanging vista, hundreds of Eskimos appeared each night on hot-rod four-wheelers, heading for the hotel bar. Frank went down the first night to have a drink with them, but they took him outside and tossed him in a blanket until he passed out. He definitely avoided drinking with them thereafter, because after three or four they became sharply conscious of the injustices Frank’s race had committed against them and began to get psyched up for another blanket toss.
The desk clerk and manager was an Englishman who had come during the sixties to do good work among the Eskimos. Funding for that had disappeared and, not wanting to leave the North, he took on the hotel job. He was a stolid Yorkshireman, settled here now with his family. He said that his children were veteran smokers and drinkers by the age of ten. “Bloody little Inuit, they are,” he told Frank.
An Eskimo woman who had gone to Toronto, a three-hundred-pound crack addict who listened to rap music on her Walkman all day, wandered into the dining room to order breakfast.
“Have I had any calls?” Frank asked. “Anything on the radio?”
“Nothing at all,” said the manager. “Your vacation winding down, is it?”
“You really never know,” said Frank. He was reduced to reading the last newspaper he had bought in the airport and speculating about the life he had left behind, if only for one of the longest weeks of his life. He learned that California community planner Richard Reese hoped to produce a more “nurturing” lifestyle in his new planned communities. Reese intended to use psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to build a town that functioned as a kind of golden stairway to wellness. On the count of three, thought Frank, all will cut off their dicks on the road to wellness. Reference made to Seaside, Florida, the assemblage of playhouses on the Gulf of Mexico. Says here that business is flat in the world of bronzed baby shoes, an admittedly “schmaltz-oriented” enterprise. Frank sighed. The faster he became an Eskimo, the better off he’d be. Then he could go home, having repaid his debt to Lucy. He could chew blubber in his office like a gentleman.
Now he mostly played the video games with those Eskimos who preferred not to drink. There was a two-seated Grand Prix game with a screen revealing a pair of racing cars ready to race if you had fifty cents and a partner. Frank played this regularly and came to know many extended Eskimo families. The steering wheels of the racing game, once black, were worn silver. Passing the winter, young Eskimos pondered the images of the red and blue Ferraris as they surged down a simulated narrow lane in pleasant southern France. Frank Copenhaver wheeled his racer among the palm trees and blue glimpses of the sea even if, as today, there was no one to race but himself. He got up and joined the crack addict for breakfast. She seemed glad of the company. She was shaky from her vice and seemed to bear an infinity of sorrows. And just when he wished to think of average things for discussion, like weather, her interests were entirely millenniaclass="underline" world war, the antichrist, the hole in the ozone layer.